Judith Santopietro’s Tiawanaku: Poems from the Mother Coqa (translated by Ilana Luna and published by Orca Libros in 2019) was sketched by the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi as “a book that dialogues with nature” with “a sensitivity that picks up on the sublime, the cosmovision, the song and the spiritual elements.” Through those poems, Santopietro enables her readers to hear Incan hymns from a distance while marveling at the mountainscape of the great Andes. Her debut poetry collection, Palabras de Agua (Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura-Praxis, 2010), was praised by Gloria Elizabeth Chacón in Indigenous Cosmolectics (2018) as a mold-breaking contribution to Nahua women’s poetry, in league with Yolanda Matías García, another Nahua poet. In mediating on her heritage language and its capacity to evoke such vivid scenes, Santopietro reveals: “I experiment with the language, Nahuatl, into my poems to recreate sounds, rhythms, and even some memories of my foremothers.’”
In 2004, Santopietro, whose writings in Spanish have elements of the Nahuatl, Quecha, and Aymara languages, also founded Iguanazul, a translingual literary magazine that promotes the oral literatures and traditions of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. The publication has since featured vital contemporary voices such as Irma Pineda, Macario Matus, Inti Barrios, Martín Rodríguez Arellano, Celerina Patricia Sánchez Santiago, Esteban Ríos Cruz, Mikeas Sánchez, and Kalu Tatyisavi—in both original texts and Spanish translations. Following this intersection between languages and heritages, individual expression and political representation, I spoke with Santopietro on how Mexikano as a silenced heritage percolates into her original writings in Spanish as a Nahua descendant, the collection Tiawanaku, and how she probes into displacement, language extinction, and indigeneity.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): You write mainly in Mexican Spanish, your mother tongue. Your writings, however, borrow from other languages such as Quecha, Aymara, and most especially your heritage language, the Nahuatl of Mexico’s largest group of indigenous peoples, the Nahua. Could you tell us more about these choices, political, ancestral, and beyond—as a poet, essayist, and translator?
Judith Santopietro (JS): Yes, as you mention, my mother tongue is Mexican Spanish—which is so close to the Nahuatl language because of all the influences that remain in our daily speech, like the diminutives that show affection. We say, “¿quieres agüita?, ¿se te antoja un tamalito? ¿te sirvo un chocolatito?”; and without realizing it, Nahuatl words slip in.
Beyond the lexicon that has remained in Mexican Spanish, there are also other, more specific manifestations like forms of healing, prayer, sowing, cooking, and even the arrangement of space in my aunt’s house, all of which led me to make the political, ancestral decision to study Nahuatl—which is called Mexikano in the town where my paternal family is from. My aunt once told me that my grandmother Otilia spoke Mexikano, but unfortunately she died young, and I couldn’t hear her speak. Still, that was doubtlessly another reason I decided to study this language.
I wasn’t immersed in the natural listening-learning process of this language because after her, no one else spoke it, but Nahua stories and beliefs remained in the rural-indigenous region where my family comes from, and they have completely influenced my writing to this day. That’s where my decision to consider myself a Nahua descendant comes from.
While I was learning the language from the Huasteca region in Veracruz (a variant different from the one my grandmother Otilia spoke because, by then, Mexikano had already disappeared in that region), I wrote several poems—or what I now call poetic exercises—in Nahuatl. I managed to think the texts through in that language, but they really carry the filter of my mother tongue and my literary influences from Spanish literature. However, I can say that during that time, the connection I achieved in dreams, on the spiritual plane, with everything and everyone who came before me, was more intense. I acquired a different sensitivity in the process of exploring writing in Nahuatl—however brief, slow, or inaccurate it may have been—through which I understood the stories my aunts and my maternal grandmother Crescencia told me during my childhood and adolescence: their beliefs, their religious and spiritual practices, their way of laughing, praying, and scolding me.
However, I realized that acquiring this language, which I hadn’t participated in learning naturally as a child, was creating a great anxiety because even after so many years, I still wasn’t able to speak it fluently or read it proficiently. That was an important reflection I shared with other friends who consider themselves Nahua descendants, but whose grandmothers did not pass on the language. We understood that there was a sense of guilt for not being able to revitalize the language in ourselves and in future generations, and that sense turned into something I would call guilt imposed by colonization. For this reason, my writing has transformed, and rather than trying to continue writing entirely in Nahuatl or Mexikano, I try to integrate concepts or words that were part of my family’s daily speech. I attempt to have my writing reflect the process of not having inherited a language due to colonization. From there comes a book I’m writing, Imahuiltia o la lengua no heredada (Imahuiltia or The Uninherited Language), in which I explore what has been hidden, unsaid, unlearned, colonized—but also the traces of the Mexikano language in my family’s memory and in dreams. The title comes from a word that an uncle and my grandmother always repeated jokingly to refer to “witchcraft,” but which in Nahuatl means “to play.”
Over the years, and in several conversations with other academics, linguists, artists, and writers descended from Indigenous peoples, I have thought about how identity is shaped beyond the original territory of one’s ancestors, and about how this identity could be shaped without the pressure of recovering lost knowledge and without feeling responsible for all of it. That must also be a process to heal a wound—the “colonial wound” that the Bolivian scholar and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui talks about.
AMMD: Tiawanaku: Poems from the Mother Coqa, your second poetry collection, was a finalist to the 2020 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation. What was the process of its creation from the Spanish original to the English edition?
JS: Tiawanaku is the journey of a woman who witnesses the war on drugs in Mexico and flees from this violence to the Andes, and this became a reason for me to discover the ancient city of Tiahuanaco and the snow-capped peaks; the work required me to write with the body and with the materiality of the environment.
The initial part of Tiawanaku was published by Hanan Harawi Editores, directed by Peruvian poet John Martínez Gonzales, and this earlier version was more baroque and archaeological, a small book that circulated hand-to-hand for a short time (as often happens with poetry books) between Peru and Mexico. I then wrote the second part of the book from what I had documented in my journals while living in Bolivia between 2013 and 2014. For this, I used my body as an instrument of the senses, and my imagination to recreate what I had experienced on a snow-covered peak like Chacaltaya, now an extinct glacier. This transformed Tiawanaku into a book-project that also addresses other processes related to illness in the body and the escape from Mexico during the early years of the drug war.
This is how Tiawanaku: Poems from the Mother Coqa is composed, and it is a book that has been very gratifying for me. Recently, Gigante Press, a publishing house based in Nicaragua, released a new edition only in Spanish. We called it a “clandestine edition” because it has been circulated through the cracks of several countries. Editors Tito Castillo and Miguel Obregón created the artistic concept of this book, publishing it as a photo-poetic essay that included photographs of my stay in Bolivia. However, the first bilingual edition, which includes the English translation, has undoubtedly been better received—not only among English-speaking readers but also among poetry readers in Spanish in the US, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, mainly in independent circles and academic spaces as well.
AMMD: In an essay published in The Shared Language of Poetry (eds. Eyda M Merediz & Tanya Huntington), you talked about language and identity. How do these concepts coincide in your work?
JS: As I mentioned in the essay, mine is a personal story—but is also political, as it opens a dialogue about issues that have been deliberately concealed and that hurt our sentipensar: issues of sexual violence, exploitation, racism, and the disappearance of languages. I use the concept of tlahtlaniā—the examination of one’s own conscience and the practice of introspection—to raise some questions about my lineage.
This essay emerged from a conversation with friends—writers and academics—about identity in Mexico, a country deeply rooted in racism and classism. During the pandemic, I held weekly Zoom meetings to discuss poetry, the lockdown, films, and current topics with the Mexican poet Maricela Guerrero, the Mexican linguist Amanda Delgado, and the Chicana poet and translator Stalina Villarreal. It brought back uncomfortable situations we had been experiencing since our childhoods, and these discussions led us to form a group we now call “Están viendo y no ven” (“They see, but don’t see”), a popular Mexican saying that refers to situations where people prefer to remain ignorant. For us, the issue was racism. We found ourselves immersed in conversations about Black and Indigenous identities, our colonial past, and the persistent shadow of racism within our own families.
From these conversations, we delved into our ancestors’ stories, trying to read every sign of love, anger, pain, and joy that they’ve revealed in our lives and dreams. We then decided, as an act of dignity, to honor these ancestors through writing and memory. We understood the enormous weight of the past that they disclosed in their stories, but unlike what they had suffered through, we decided to carry more than their pain. We choose to listen to the messages they convey through us, to bring their presence into our poetry through vital characters. As women who struggle with inner emotional conflicts produced by our decision to embrace self-identification, we have decided to move forward from the suffering that colonialism imposed, and to focus instead on transforming, restoring, and healing our relationships.
Acknowledging that I am of Nahua descent implied far more than recalling pleasant or bucolic memories from my ancestors’ stories; it involved a complex political process of recognition. According to the Mexican Constitution, it is not just a right to self-identify as indigenous, but it is also a political category that must be defended and proven before the State and others.
At the beginning of those intimate conversations, I spent time in the little garden of my childhood home trying to recall the essentials, and made a list of things that I did not inherit from my Nahua family: I did not inherit the Mexikano or Nahuatl language. I did not inherit the traditional knowledge of cultivating maíz, the cycles of the harvest, nor the special rituals. But as we gathered every week, we found a wide variety of ways to name ourselves, to recover the identity that had been troubling our minds and spirits. A list of inherited traits then emerged. I recalled past and ongoing conversations with my family that brought up not only traumatic and violent memories, but also a secret wisdom that remains alive in my daily life.
I truly believe that the narratives of our foremothers subvert the codes of representation; their bodies and voices destabilize colonial accounts by emerging in stories. Depicting them in my poetry as brave women, highly intuitive healers, or storytellers who invent fantastical stories of nahuales (shape-shifting animals) is fundamental to addressing another topic that matters: representation. Telling their stories in literature is to narrate my rebellion.
AMMD: As someone who is both a poet being translated (by Ilana Luna, Tanya Huntington, Whitney DeVos, and Mary Ann Newman) and a translator of your own poems from the Nahuatl, in what ways can translation be decolonized, given its colonial, imperialist history, and legacy since time immemorial?
JS: One reason I am interested in emphasizing the migration of Indigenous peoples is that the Indigenous language does not carry the entire weight of identity and belonging to a culture, because colonial languages like Spanish and English also function within these communities to transmit knowledge. For me, having my work translated into English represents a possibility to connect and have in-depth conversations with those readers whose origins are in Latin America or Abya Yala.
Colonial languages like English or Spanish can become vehicles to address topics not often explored by Anglo-American literature, and even more significantly, colonial languages are profoundly transformed by those speakers and their culture, thought, ancestral wisdom, presence, accents, and much more. I remember that in 2022, I was invited to do a poetry reading and discussion in English with students at the West Texas A&M University. I didn’t feel entirely comfortable doing this activity primarily for English speakers, but when I arrived, I realized that most of the students were children of people who had migrated around 2010. As the reading and conversation progressed, some of the reasons behind the students’ displacement from Mexico began to reveal themselves. Poetry, translated into English, brought back those memories of when they were very small and would watch the soldiers through the window, of when they had to hide in their homes, because outside there was a war against drug trafficking.
I also believe that translating authors who are outside the literary hegemony achieves an exercise of decolonization, as when I had the opportunity to translate Tonya Foster, a Black American feminist scholar and poet, from English to Spanish, or Gabriela Mistral´s poems into Nahuatl alongside professor Sabina Cruz de la Cruz.
AMMD: Speaking of forthcoming projects, I’d love to hear more about your current work on a poetry collection that retells the enforced disappearances in Mexico.
JS: Currently there are over a hundred thousand missing people in Mexico. During a series of poetry workshops I held in 2020 with search collectives in Veracruz and Puebla, a personal reflection arose on the most terrible episodes of violence I lived through during the early years of the war on drugs, which I had been avoiding writing about. Back then, there had been an attempted kidnapping in the High Mountains of Veracruz by a drug cartel, and my nephew Juan was murdered by the Mexican Navy just one day later. I had documented the impact of this in journals, but for many years, I considered my personal testimony unimportant among so many stories of violence and terror occurring in Mexico since the war on drugs was declared. However, thanks to what I called “body-to-body writing” in the workshops, I came to understand the weight of speaking the trauma aloud, of recognizing the wounded body, and of collectively stitching together a wound that, as the mothers in those workshops said, “never heals.”
By naming absence and the surrounding environment, we wrote poems, all of us. Accompanying them allowed me to confront my own testimony, and I decided then to write this book about what happened to me, but alongside questions that have emerged and been resolved over these years: How do we dignify memory? How can writing accompany the search? What does the war represent for my mother, for those around me? Who are my own disappeared?
Of course, I found them, because they were asleep in a corner of my childhood. I spoke with my mother, and we remembered my newborn niece who was stolen and disappeared during the 1990s, for whom my family organized search brigades in all the surrounding towns. I recall my parents and uncles becoming investigators, gathering information every day while seated at the table. We also remembered another cousin, a woman who disappeared overnight in adulthood. To this day, we have not heard from them again.
In this project, I am specifically using resources of documentary poetry, drawing from works such as The Book of the Dead by Muriel Rukeyser, Coal Mountain Elementary by Mark Nowak, Cartucho by Nellie Campobello, San Fernando: Última parada: Viaje al crimen autorizado en Tamaulipas by Marcela Turati, and La dimensión desconocida by Nona Fernández. These works inspire me to bring direct testimony, investigative tools, voices, maps, and routes into poetry, to speak of the disappeared in the present.
AMMD: If you were to teach a course on Nahuatl poetry, what collections and poems would you wish to include as key texts?
JS: I would include not only poetry in Nahuatl but also works in other Abya Yala languages, as well as those written by Indigenous writers in English and colonial languages like Spanish. We must remember that there has been a violent process aimed at erasing Indigenous languages. For instance, in the US and Canada, most First Nations writers write in English. Thus, I do not see language as the backbone of identity; this is a debatable and controversial argument because almost all discourses on identity and Indigenous languages claim that language upholds an entire culture, but after holding workshops for migrant populations in New York City and spending time studying the cultural manifestations of Indigenous peoples in new territories, I realized that there is a way of seeing the world, of thinking, dreaming, and identifying oneself even when the language has not been transmitted to subsequent generations. Even without the language, people continue to consider themselves part of an Indigenous community.
I believe this has been the process for many writers, and it is especially noticeable among nations that—unlike Mexico—have set aside language as a requirement for someone to identify as Indigenous; for them, cultural heritage and ties to the community are enough to belong to an Indigenous people. I refer to poetry as a genre, free of labels, stripped of any political category like “indigenous.”
That being said, I would include the anthology En esa redonda nación de sangre: Poesía indígena estadounidense contemporánea (translated into Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Núñez Rodríguez), a fundamental piece for understanding not only the resistance of Native American writers who inhabit Turtle Island, but also the formations of their identity—which persist despite the violent processes of colonization that sought to erase, assimilate, and impose English as their language. Authors like Simon Ortiz (Acoma, Pueblo), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), Cathy Tagnak Rexford (Iñupiaq), Joy Harjo (Muscogee) among others, are part of this anthology.
I can tell you that holding workshops has, in some way, allowed me to build this imaginary syllabus, where I have included some poets and writers I consider essential. Paula López, a Nahuat Pipil poet from El Salvador, whose poem “Achtu at” (“Primera lluvia”) I have only been able to hear, but which has captivated me for years. Every time I return to it, I find the voices of water. I would also include the anthology Quince poetas del mundo náhuatl by Miguel León Portilla, which offers a significant selection of Mesoamerican poets and poetic forms such as xopancuicatl, huehuehtlahtolli, xochicuicatl, huehuecuicatl, totocuicatl, icnocuicatl, among others. Additionally, the anthology Originaria, which includes an important selection of women writers in Indigenous languages from Mexico, such as Nadia López García, Ruperta Bautista Vázquez, Mikeas Sánchez, Cruz Alejandra Lucas Juárez, and many more.
I would also include the works of Wington González, Briceida Cuevas Cob, Miguel Ángel Oxlaj Cúmez, Daniela Catrileo, Manuel Bolom Pale, Gabriel Pacheco Salvador, Martín Tonalmeyotl, Araceli Patlani, and Mikel Ruiz.
Undoubtedly, I would add the performative and expanded poetry work of other Indigenous artists and writers, such as Lukas Avendaño, who explores muxeidad; Karloz Atl, Rosa Chávez, and Manuel Tzoc. Of course, many names escape me in this syllabus, which could very well be an infinite course in which we’d read authors from all the Indigenous regions of this world.
Judith Santopietro (she/her) is a poet, essayist, translator, and editor born in Córdoba, Veracruz, Mexico and raised between Ixhuatlán del Café and Boca del Monte, campesino-indigenous communities in the Altas Montañas to which her family belongs. She has authored the poetry collections Palabras de Agua (Mexico: Editorial Praxis, 2010) and Tiawanaku: Poemas de la Madre Coqa (Peru: Hanan Harawi Editores, 2017), translated by Ilana Dann Luna into Tiawanaku: Poems from the Mother Coqa (Orca Libros, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation. She founded Iguanazul: Literatura en Lenguas Originarias with a mission to revitalize native languages in Mexico. A visiting fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, her original works and translations have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Anuario de Poesía Mexicana, and Rio Grande Review, among others. She holds an MA in Iberian & Latin American Literatures & Cultures from the University of Texas at Austin, and currently she is writing her debut novel on Indigenous migration. Her website linktr.ee/judithsantopietro.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of three books of prose poetry and lyric essays including M of the Southern Downpours (Australia: Downingfield Press, 2024). Their works—published from South Africa to Japan, France to Singapore, and translated into Chinese, Damiá, and Swedish—appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sant Jordi Festival of Books, and the anthologies Infinite Constellations (University of Alabama Press) and He, She, They, Us: Queer Poems (Macmillan UK). Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, they’ve been nominated to The Best Literary Translations and twice to the Pushcart Prize for their lyric essays. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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